Notice that some airports have their own railway station, but their three-letter codes are not the same as the IATA abbreviation. (MAN is Manchester Piccadilly). Conversely, our corporate air travel provider now offers international rail tickets too, and has invented bogus pseudo-IATA codes for the railway stations. I think London St Pancras International (which is STP in the rail scheme) is QQF or something. The booking site being rather useless, this doesn't actually come up if you search for "flights" from "London". You just have to know.

I do this with currency codes, though I try to pronounce them as words, so that, for example, Swiss Francs are "chuffs".

"SWF"'s 'real' tag could be DSA ("Doncaster/Sheffield Airport", previously "Robin Hood Airport (Doncaster Sheffield1)", previously "RAF Finningley"…) or NQT ("Nottingham (City) Airport"), or somewhere like Ossington or Gamston airfields (there being half a dozen small landing spots nearly equidistant from Edwinstowe, generally acknowledged to be the centre of the current Sherwood Forest, so much smaller than its historical extents) that may have ICAO ids, but not IATA ones. And that's just the operational ones I can find. There were a multitude of airfields set up in this area (generally to the east, in the flat lands) during WW2 so as to send the air war over to occupied northern Europe and to intercept the air war being sent over here from there. With a bit of digging (I think I once played paintball at a (relatively-)new-growth plantation location very near Edwinstowe that seemed to have concrete aprons in one section reminiscent of an abandoned RAF station) one could probably find something that was practically "RAF Sherwood Forest", if not exactly.

(A quick Google suggests that a Lord Sherwood was a past Honorary Air Commodore to No. 504 Squadron, of the RAF. But they are associated with Rutland and Cambridgeshire/East Northamptonshire (north East Northamptonshire, to be more precise!).)

Just adding to the information above...

1 Or Doncaster Sheffield Rotherham Barnsley or suchlike. There was a Sheffield City Airport (SZD), far nearer to Loxley (as in "Robin of", but still not next door) that effectively shut down fifteen years ago due to operational losses (and, possibly not coincidentally, having been passed to the company that was starting up the Robin Hood airport scheme), and Doncaster/etc airport basically serves the area like SZD never did manage to do. For one thing, it's not on an awkward hilly area, and it's not so far from several major road arteries.

Having played (or simmed) Flight Sim of various guises through the years though I'm more familiar with the ICAO four letter codes for various airports, which outside of the USA pretty much bear no relation to the IATA codes (many US airports it's just the IATA code with a K prefix, but this is not true for all of them), and also let you identify where the airport is (e.g. first letter K - United States, or first two letters EG - United Kingdom & dependencies).

Notice that some airports have their own railway station, but their three-letter codes are not the same as the IATA abbreviation. (MAN is Manchester Piccadilly). Conversely, our corporate air travel provider now offers international rail tickets too, and has invented bogus pseudo-IATA codes for the railway stations. I think London St Pancras International (which is STP in the rail scheme) is QQF or something. The booking site being rather useless, this doesn't actually come up if you search for "flights" from "London". You just have to know.

I do this with currency codes, though I try to pronounce them as words, so that, for example, Swiss Francs are "chuffs".

What is the abbreviation for Hogsmeade?

I am Lord Titanius Englesmith, Fancyman of Cornwood.See 1 Kings 7:23 for pi.If you put a prune in a juicer, what would you get?

whomever1 wrote:I spend a lot of time in the Kingdom of Loathing--who says it's not a real place? My Disco Bandit is level 19!

It must be a place, you can be west of it, furthermore it's had an Elemental International Airport for over 3 years! It does not however have a IATA code. Not too sure what EIA is.... but I was wondering why it wasn't KOL and now I know.

Is that some sort of weighted average, or minimum population per city, or something?

San Jose, CA (about 1 million people) plus San Jose, Costa Rica (334 thousand), is much smaller than New York, New York (12 million) plus New York, Texas (20 people). I'm sure there are many other pairs like that... Paris, France (2+ million) plus any of the two-dozen-or-so other Parises (Texas, again, for 25 thousand), if you need the cities to be in two countries... Counting "metro area" populations to include suburbs doesn't move the Sans Jose ahead, either.

Or is it land area and not population? I'm guessing some sprawled-out midwestern cities might win over dense Californian ones there, too...

Is that some sort of weighted average, or minimum population per city, or something?

I'd assume largest smaller city just from the name of the statistic. Otherwise, you're pretty much just saying "largest city with another city with the same name" and getting caught up in quibbles about definitions of "city".

Is that some sort of weighted average, or minimum population per city, or something?

San Jose, CA (about 1 million people) plus San Jose, Costa Rica (334 thousand), is much smaller than New York, New York (12 million) plus New York, Texas (20 people). I'm sure there are many other pairs like that... Paris, France (2+ million) plus any of the two-dozen-or-so other Parises (Texas, again, for 25 thousand), if you need the cities to be in two countries... Counting "metro area" populations to include suburbs doesn't move the Sans Jose ahead, either.

Or is it land area and not population? I'm guessing some sprawled-out midwestern cities might win over dense Californian ones there, too...

Population of the smaller city of the pair. That keeps you from counting things like "Canton, Ohio and Canton, China", or "Moscow, Russia and Moscow, Idaho" where some piddling wide spot in the road has the same name as an important world city. The unstated component is that I wanted one US and one non-US city, which immediately disqualified London (England and Ontario).

I got started looking for the answer to that when I guy I worked with said he had a job prospect in Alexandria and I had to ask him "Virginia or Egypt?"

I've similarly noted, having lived near both sides of a county line my whole life, that "The Tri-County Area" means different things depending on which side of that line you are. In Ventura County, that means Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties. In Santa Barbara County, that apparently means the San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties.

Basically "The Tri-County Area" is whichever county you're in and its two neighbors (not counting the inland neighbor because nobody lives there anyway, that's all just barren wasteland as far as the eye can see).

Tacking on to this, while LHR (London Heathrow) is the airport //most// people would fly into to get to London, there are two other airports serving the area as well: LGW (London Gatwick) and LCA (London City Airport). That said, based on the location of Sherwood Forest you'd be better off flying into Doncaster-Sheffield (DSA) [Formerly named "Robin Hood Airport"!, or maybe Manchester International (MAN) or Birmingham (BHX).

alexriehl wrote:Tacking on to this, while LHR (London Heathrow) is the airport //most// people would fly into to get to London, there are two other airports serving the area as well: LGW (London Gatwick) and LCA (London City Airport).

It’s even worse than that - there’s also London Stansted (STN, more truthfully called Bishops Stortford Airport) and London Southend (SEN, a dog-and-pony show one hour by car or train from anywhere you’d remotely call London).

Many people seem to think that everywhere in England is in London, and the airports aren’t helping ...

Although for me they are last-resort options (mainly because I live in South London), Luton and Stansted don't really have much less of a claim to be "London" airports than Gatwick, based on distance, as shown in the map below. Gatwick has always been considered a London airport, well before budget airlines started pulling the "<Name of important world city> (not really)" trick: it even has an "L" in its IATA code to prove it.

As the map shows, the real issue is the travel time, which is only weakly correlated with the distance. The 15 minute figure for Heathrow assumes that you're prepared to pay one of the world's most eyewatering train fares for the Heathrow Express, and that only gets you to Paddington, which isn't really in the centre. But it all depends on where you're ultimately travelling to/from. Heathrow is annoyingly disconnected - the Piccadilly line takes forever, and whilst there used to be an express bus to/from Feltham railway station, handy for SW London, that was discontinued, presumably in order to hand a juicy monopoly to the operators of Heathrow Express. However! When Crossrail (a.k.a. the Elizabeth Line) opens, travel to Heathrow ought to get a lot better. Luton doesn't have its own railway station: you have to take a shuttle bus from Luton Airport Parkway, so I'm suspicious of the 24 minute figure.

Is that some sort of weighted average, or minimum population per city, or something?

San Jose, CA (about 1 million people) plus San Jose, Costa Rica (334 thousand), is much smaller than New York, New York (12 million) plus New York, Texas (20 people). I'm sure there are many other pairs like that... Paris, France (2+ million) plus any of the two-dozen-or-so other Parises (Texas, again, for 25 thousand), if you need the cities to be in two countries... Counting "metro area" populations to include suburbs doesn't move the Sans Jose ahead, either.

Or is it land area and not population? I'm guessing some sprawled-out midwestern cities might win over dense Californian ones there, too...

The peculiar arrangements in Alaska mean that the winner - probably the worldwide winner - is Sitka, AK plus whichever of the various other Sitkas in the country is biggest.

The real station that stands in for Hogsmeade is Goathland, but this does not have a station code as it's not a mainline station and hasn't been since the 1960's - it's currently part of the North Yorkshire Moors Heritage Railway that runs steam trains as a tourist attraction. If it was still a mainline station it would logically have GOA as its code, as that has not been taken by any other British stations at the moment.